The Apple engineers' eyes bulged in astonishment. In any other system the programmer would have had to rewrite the code and recompile a huge block of the program, maybe even all of it. The process might take hours. Thanks to its object-oriented modularity, in Smalltalk such a modest change never required the recompiling of more than ten or twenty lines, which could be done in a second or two. "It was essentially instantaneous," Ingalls recalled. Of course, it helped that as one of Smalltalk's creators he was able to make the change as though by instinct. "We were ringers," he confessed. "We knew that system from top to bottom."
"They were totally blown away," Tesler confirmed. "Jobs was waving his arms around, saying, 'Why hasn't this company brought this to market? What's going on here? I don't get it!' Meantime the other guys were trying to ignore the shouting. They had to concentrate and learn as much as they could in the hour they were going to be there."
The creation myth of the Lisa and Macintosh holds that Steve Jobs, in the grip of an epiphany brought on by PARC's dazzling technology, headed straight back to Apple headquarters and ripped up a year's worth of planning for the Lisa user interface. Jobs himself recalled how he returned to his office that afternoon "a raving maniac," insisting the Lisa be reconfigured to replicate the Altos dynamic display. "It was one of those apocalyptic moments," he said. "I remember within ten minutes of seeing the graphical user interface stuff, just knowing that every computer would work this way some day. It was so obvious."
Something of the sort did happen, but without quite so much sturm und drang. The essential appearance and functionality of the Smalltalk interface—its "look and feel," so to speak—did become reflected in that of the Lisa and Macintosh.
Lisa’s architects, many of them transplants from the staid purlieus of Hewlett-Packard, had already designed a graphical user interface, but their version was far more static than the Altos. Theirs lacked Smalltalk's dynamic overlapping windows, for example, but radier displayed one active application at a time, taking up the whole screen.
Nor did the Lisa originally place as much reliance on the mouse. This was the subject of heated disagreement within Apple. The main pointing device of the original Lisa interface was something called a "softkey," which appeared on the screen as a sort of menu listing the command options for the user at any given moment: If the active application was a text editor, for example, it might offer the choices of insert and delete. The user selected a softkey by using keyboard keys to move an arrow on the screens, then executed the command by striking "enter." The mouse was available, but it was scantily used and entirely optional.
Bill Atkinson, whose intense concentration during the demo left such a strong impression on Tesler, had spent months trying to design a more dynamic interface. But he had been unable to solve several programming problems, including how to write text into an irregularly shaped region of the screen—for example, the corner of one window peeking out from beneath another. This, of course, was a problem Dan Ingalls had long since solved via BitBlt (but had never published). Atkinson later maintained that seeing the overlapping windows on the Alto screen was for him more a confidence-builder than a solution to his quandary. He subsequently solved the same problem in his own way but, as he later remarked, "That whirlwind tour left an impression on me. Knowing it could be done empowered me to invent a way it could be done."
The demo also gave him the necessarv ammunition to win the battle over the mouse. Atkinson thought the device needed to be standard equipment on every Lisa, rather than an option; only then would Apple be sure that software developers would always deploy it as an integral part of the system. After PARC he no longer got an argument from Steve Jobs, or anyone else."
On the other hand, Atkinson discerned in Smalltalk numerous shortcomings he resolved to correct. For one thing, it was painfully slow, an artifact of the Alto's lightweight memory and the language's "interpreted" structure, which loaded the central processing unit with more work than it could comfortably handle. "The system was crippled by a factor of ten, and it showed," he recalled. "It wasn't fast enough for a commercial application. You would watch characters appear on the screen one by one, like on a agonizingly slow modem."*
As for Jobs, he was so "saturated" by the power of the user interface he had seen that he ignored the other two phenomena he was being shown: object-oriented programming, which was the essence of Smalltalk, and networking. The fact that PARC had some 200 Altos connected to the Ethernet at the time of the Jobs demo made no impression on the Apple team. Neither the Lisa nor the first versions of the Macintosh were equipped with network ports. (A famous story had Jobs answering a question about how to network the Mac by flinging a floppy disk at the questioner and barking, "There's my fucking network!")
It may be that PARC's most important influence on the Lisa and Macintosh was a spiritual one. A design manifesto the Lisa designers produced with a month or so of their visit could have sprung full-blown from the mind of Alan Kay or Larry Tesler. "Lisa must be fun to use," it commanded. "It will not be a system that is used by someone 'because it is part of the job' or 'because the boss told them to.' Special attention must be paid to the friendliness of the user interaction and the subtleties that make using the Lisa rewarding and job-enriching."
*"Atkinson has long resented the importance others have attached to his visit to PARC. "In hindsight I would rather we'd never have gone," he said. "Those one and a half hours tainted everything we did, and so much of what we did was original research."
And for all the impact that the PARC had on Apple, over the long run Apple's impact on the PARC scientists themselves may have been more pronounced. They had started out disparaging Jobs and his customers, but his fanatic enthusiasm for their work hit them like a lightning bolt. It was a powerful sign that the outside world would welcome all they had achieved within their moated palace while toiling for an indifferent Xerox. Steve Jobs did more than open the floodgates of ideas out of PARC. He started the exodus of human beings.
Among the first to go was Larry Tesler. During the summer preceding Jobs s visit, Tesler had traveled around Europe. In a rural French village he stopped to have his tarot read by a fortune teller. "She was just an interesting old French lady who made a bunch of predictions, all of which came true. Maybe they were self-fulfilling prophecies. She told me I'd leave my job within a year, and I left eleven months later. I couldn't believe her at the time. I said, 'But I have the very best job . . .' But maybe I was ready."
Early in 1980 Jobs asked Xerox for a license to use Smalltalk in the Lisa. In an unexpected burst of proprietary pride, Xerox turned him down. (The company had already divested its equity in Apple, thus missing out on the computer company's extraordinary run-up in value at the time of its 1980 initial public stock offering.) Steve Jobs made his offer instead to Tesler, one of Smalltalk's developers.
Heeding the mysterious tarot, Tesler accepted the job that April. He would go on to head the Lisa user interface team and to help design the Macintosh, eventually rising to the position of Apple's chief scientist. The sign he was waiting for had come. PARC's elitism had begun to seem threadbare, and even a little reactionary.
"I remember once I said to Bob Taylor, 'You know, I've been going to these Homebrew computer meetings and I've been talking to people at Apple and hanging out in the personal computer scene. There's a lot of smart people out there who are going to run way ahead of PARC in PCs. Xerox will never catch up, even with better stuff.'
"And Taylor smoked his pipe and said, 'No, that's not going to happen, because we have the smartest people here. I believe if you have the smartest people you'll end up ahead.' "I said, 'Bob, I've met people outside. They're very smart in this place, no question about it, but there are smart people who don't work for PARC. They do exist, and there are enough of them out there that they can do just fine.'
"He said, 'If you find someone as smart as the people here, just tell me who they are and we'll hire them!'
&
nbsp; "I just told him, 'It's not going to work like that.'"
CHAPTER 24
Supernova
Even before Steve Jobs's arrival on the scene PARC had been facing the prospect of wrenching change. The first sign that trouble lay ahead came in May 1978, just after that years annual corporate meeting in San Francisco. That Friday, when the Xerox contingent had already returned back East, George Pake got a phone call from Jack Goldman.
In terms of both men s careers, it was almost as momentous a call as the one eight years earlier when Goldman had offered Pake the chance to manage a unique new research center. But this was a different Jack Goldman. Pake's old mentor, far from being at the top of his game with all the resources of a powerful industrial machine at his command, sounded frightened and querulous.
"George," he said, "you gotta be here in Connecticut on Monday. I gotta talk to you. They're taking the research labs away from me."
As long as Jack Goldman had toiled under the protective shade of Peter McColough he tended to win a fair share of his battles with Xerox culture and bureaucracy, especially the early crucial skirmishes over the consolidation of all Xerox research in his own hands and the establishment of PARC. But as the lost decade of the 1970s wore on and Xerox sank deeper into its slough, Goldman's distance from the chairman's ear lengthened and his influence waned. Just as McColough had recruited Goldman from Ford to reanimate Xerox research, he had imported a group of outside finance experts to modernize the company's ailing revenue and expense structures. More and more, they were in charge.
They proved to be a stultifying and self-perpetuating cadre. Company President Archie McCardell, whose passion for figures rivaled that of the ancient numerologists, came from Ford, whence he recruited Jim O'Neill, who had once been his superior, to head the Information Technology Group. Soon they were joined by three other Ford men, clustered in the highest stratum of Xerox management. By the start of 1978 Goldman was still a member of Xerox's board of directors, but no longer reported directly to Peter McColough. Instead he was sequestered three rungs down in the organizational ladder and outnumbered by the newcomers.
He did not take well to the de facto demotion, nor to the alien management culture that McCardell and O'Neill had brought with them. As he witnessed the new men's ineffectual struggle to stem Xerox's decline from a vantage point hopelessly remote from the seat of power, he became more irascible. Jack Goldman's aura was beginning to fade, one loyalist recalled, "accelerated by his indubitably abrasive manner in the presence of incompetence, which was abundant at the higher levels of Xerox."
This was a somewhat unfair assessment of the new executives. Many were simply in the wrong place in the wrong company. Xerox needed to embrace radical new technologies to resuscitate its product lines. But they were trying to squeeze the last drops of blood from the same tired copiers by applying snazzy new management theories and pinching pennies. Had the crisis been rooted solely in Xerox's complacency or a bad economy, their reorganizations and cost-cutting strategies might have borne fruit. But the affliction ran much deeper.
Perhaps the best illustration of the conflict between the new technologists and the financial engineers was the short, bitter career of Myron Tribus, who was hired on Goldman's recommendation as senior vice president for research and engineering in 1972 and got driven out by O'Neill before the close of 1974. Crusty and temperamental, Tribus was a former Commerce Department official and dean of engineering at Dartmouth. He was also, as Goldman attested, "one of the most brilliant engineers in this country. A difficult guy to deal with, as is often the case when you're dealing with geniuses, but an absolutely brilliant engineer."
Tribus realized within a few weeks of his arrival in Rochester that Xerox executives did not define their business as making copiers, but rather as making money. The products generating the revenues were almost irrelevant; for them the issues of management would have been no different had they been turning out cars, or raw steel, or shoes. "They saw Xerox as a money pump and they organized it around that concept," Tribus said. "The people at the top of Xerox were not really interested in technology."
As a result, Xerox technology and engineering had turned distinctly slovenly. Customer complaints battered against the company walls like a storm surge, but no system existed to convert reports from the field into product improvements. Tribus imposed a rigorous order on this haphazard environment. He demanded that every part going into a Xerox copier, down to the smallest spring, be documented like a component in a jet engine so that repairmen and engineers needed only to flip open a book to locate the trouble spots. "I realized," he said, "we had to get reliability."
Almost alone among the top executives, Tribus was enchanted with PARC. He visited Palo Alto regularly and, back home, pressured O'Neill to market the laser printer as an alternative to the slow and noisy IBM machines whose hideous output then passed for high-tech computer printing. After Tribus's secretary was awarded an Alto out of the corporate consignment he studied the change in her work habits with frank fascination. "When they took it away to check on its wear and tear she cried, really cried," he said. "I thought to myself, 'This is something really big.'"
Unfortunately, one skill Tribus had not learned during his long career in government and academia was how to survive in a corporate executive suite. He was constitutionally unable to coddle underlings or suffer fools gladly; nor was he alert to the necessity of protecting his flank. Even subordinates who admired his brains hated his brusque and doctrinaire manner. As for his peers in management, who resented the blunt delight with which he rubbed their noses in his superior technical judgment, they smelled his lack of corporate savvy like lions circling a lame wildebeest.
Eventually he ended up sandwiched in the pecking order between O'Neill and an engineering manager named Robert J. Sparacino. Sparacino had honed his corporate infighting skills at that war college of internal competition, General Motors, where an executive at Pontiac would win as much praise for outsmarting his compeers at Buick as for beating Chrysler. O'Neill at first assigned him to be Tribus's subordinate, but over a period of montiis arranged to give the junior man more responsibilities at Tribus's expense.
"They connived to get rid of me," Tribus recalled. "I had never been in a corporation. I found myself in an alien land, and working at the top I saw a lot of things going on that I thought were just plain stupid. But the other guys had MBAs and I did not, and they talked a common language and I was clearly an outsider. I fought that system tooth and nail until some of my good friends came to me and said, 'Myron, you look like hell, working from seven in the morning till seven at night surrounded by guys who just want to do you in. You've got to get out of there or you'll be dead in a year.'"
Tribus's resignation in 1974 to accept a teaching post at MIT deprived Goldman of a soulmate and an ally. He was left to fight the Ford finance clique as a minority of one. What he lacked in manpower he made up for in vituperation. The carping within the executive suite grew intolerable. While Goldman sniped at the very idea of having "the engineering division headed up by an accountant who just didn't understand things like Moore's Law or the role of software," O'Neill and Sparacino nagged him about the half-baked and unmarketable prototypes coming out of PARC. Sparacino at one point was heard to remark that "office systems will never amount to diddly-squat at Xerox," a prophecy many thought he worked to make self-fulfilling.
But Goldman did not always have realism on his side. Even his closest allies recognized that he had little conception of the economics of product development—the indispensable second half of "R&D."
"Jack did not understand what you had to do with bright ideas from bright people to make them into real products that could go into a real market," acknowledged George White, a member of his research management staff. And with O'Neill and Sparacino continuing to control all marketing and engineering, Goldman had less clout than ever to force research-driven products into the marketplace even as
market probes. It was his old problem at Ford ("Not much of your stuff gets on a car, does it, Jack?"), exacerbated by vicious personal animosities. He could only watch powerlessly as his most cherished ventures—the laser printer sale to Lawrence Livermore, the marketing of the Alto III—became the victims of political spats.
After Archie McCardell, O'Neill's chief sponsor, resigned the Xerox presidency in 1977 to become chief executive of International Harvester, Goldman apparently believed he might yet gain the upper hand over his adversaries. Instead the conflict only became more disruptive. The backdoor sniping was bad enough, but when Goldman and O'Neill were face to face, as at executive conferences or board meetings, they treated each other with such an excess of gritted-teeth deference that the tension in the room was palpable. McColough and David Kearns, who had been appointed McCardell's successor as president, "were kind of embarrassed by the feuding, which went on even in public," George Pake recalled. "The corporation got pretty impatient with that."
The 1978 annual shareholders meeting in San Francisco was another glittering showcase for Goldman, who invited his fellow board members down to Palo Alto for a beguiling tour of his citadel on Coyote Hill. But it was his last hurrah. On their first day back in Stamford he received a summons from David Kearns. The new president informed him that research needed to be yoked more closely to engineering and manufacturing. Therefore, he said, he was reorganizing it from a corporate-level function to a subdivision of engineering—that is, under Jim O'Neill and Bob Sparacino. Kearns, to be fair, may not have fully understood the historic message he was thereby sending: Since the days of Chester Carlson and John Dessauer, research had never been ranked so low in the organizational charts at Xerox.
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